In partnership with our home, contents and vehicle repair suppliers, our claims initiatives include using innovative repair techniques and new schemes to minimise waste and emissions.
‘Repair over replace’ in home insurance
In home, our restoration suppliers offer hard-surface repairs and a resurfacing service that fixes scratches, dents, chips, cracks and burns on various household items.
For household claims, we partner with expert furniture repairers who use innovative techniques to repair and restore furniture such as chairs and tables.
We also use specialists to repair broken jewellery, dry, clean and restore property damaged by floods or fire, and salvage parts from electrical goods such as mobile phones for use in future repairs.
‘Repair over replace’ in motor insurance
Over the past few years, we have embedded a repair-over-replace ethos in motor repairs.
We also encourage our customers to repair tiny cracks in windscreens before replacing the entire windshield. Our repairers’ policy of early intervention reduces glass waste and energy.
Green parts extend use and reduce waste
We are committed early adopters of green initiatives, like our multi-award-winning Green Car Parts programme.
In 2023 we won the Recycled Vehicle Parts User Award at the ATF Professional Awards for actively promoting and using recycled parts in our operations. In 2024, the extent of our commitment was recognised with the prestigious edie Circular Economy Innovation Award.
Referred to as green car parts, these are original manufacturer car parts taken from one vehicle and used to fix another. This reduces the use of raw materials, extends the life of existing parts, and minimises the likelihood of damaged cars being scrapped due to the cost of new parts.
By safely redeploying parts from our own supply of 'donor vehicles' and feeding them back into our repair network, we've effectively created a circular economy within our own repair ecosystem. In doing so, we keep our repair costs and customer premiums down while creating carbon savings.
In 2023, we achieved:
- 10,127 green parts used to repair our own customers’ cars
- 539 tonnes of CO₂ savings from green parts used
- 9,725 vehicles insured by Ageas that were damaged beyond repair were salvaged, and nearly 3,000 parts were used to repair the vehicles of other Ageas customers
Helping our customers adapt to climate change
We understand that climate change and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are affecting our customers.
Flooding, heatwaves and storms are among the natural challenges we are all living with. Since 2016, we have helped people in high flood risk areas access insurance through our work with Flood Re – a joint initiative between the Government and insurers. The reinsurance scheme helps keep home insurance costs low for customers in high flood risk areas by placing the flood risk element of their policy with Flood Re, which we help to fund through a levy.
We were an early signatory to Build Back Better, a scheme from Flood Re. Through Build Back Better, we help fund and install flood resistance and resilience measures to the homes of qualifying customers whose homes have been flooded. The measures could include flood barriers, higher plug sockets and self-closing airbricks to reduce the impact should a similar event occur again.
WeatherNet
As a recognised authority on UK weather and climate, WeatherNet offers us access to comprehensive and granular weather data from its exclusive network of weather stations and remotely sensed sources, updated in real time.
In response to the increase in extreme weather events, Ageas is the first insurer to deploy WeatherNet’s SurgeCast application. By innovatively applying deep learning from a study of historical weather events, we are able to forecast the geographical impact of extreme weather for our policyholders.
This cutting-edge capability allows us to identify and support customers that are most at risk of inbound extreme weather. The foresight this technology has given us has informed our customer-facing weather hub and enables us to make outbound calls and send alert emails and texts to our customers and brokers prior to storms.